Location: West Australia, near to the beach, natural ambient sounds mostly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nigelwright7557

I couldn't see a PA just Marshall speakers stacked 3 high across the stage.

THE best sounding show I have worked was a 20,000 audience AC/DC concert (mid nineties).
FOH PA was all Meyer active cabinets....I forget how many cabinets, but semi-trailer loads of FR cabinets, and subs.

Backline was 8 Marshall quad boxes per guitarist....all plugged in and working.
Wedges, side fills and drum monitors powered by around 50kW of Amcrons.

I had a yarn with the FOH engineer.....with stage going full tilt and the FOH PA turned OFF, he has measured 125dBA !....this figure was confirmed in a magazine article a month later.
During roadie sound check, one of the guitar roadies stood centre stage and strummed/played some stuff while the foldback engineer got his mix/levels happening.
Then the guitar roadie played a chord, got it to feed, and kept it feeding for the next two minutes or so while he moved over every inch of the stage....impressive.

The Eagles have long been a Clair account and thus (unfortunately) use their latest and largest array, the i5. While perhaps on par with some current offerings, the reality is that at present no system comes close to the D&B J-series. The Germans are so far ahead of everyone else across the entire product line that it's not even close. One great advantage of J's is that they are a great deal more forgiving than most arrays in terms of focus, shading, and time alignment. In short, it's much harder to screw them up, while it's quite easy to take a fine PA from L'Acoustics, Meyer, or JBL and mangle it with poor systems engineering. At the end of the day, Clair is a relatively low production proprietary box, and while better than your local clubs home brew, it's this audio professionals opinion that they will never compete with D&B. Ironically I say that while currently carrying a Clair rig on my own tour, but then lowly sound engineers don't often get to make financial decisions. In your case, I'd attribute the shortcomings of the show to failures on the part of the FOH engineer but especially the systems tech in charge of tuning and time alignment. In a club or theatre environment, we generally have to make compromises, but at the production level of the most overrated classic rock band in history, there is really no excuse for not having a high fidelity experience in every seat in the hall.